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Friday, January 11, 2013

Pending Upgrades

Well this week has been disappointing into receiving shipments, but I won't completely go into that. The one that matters on this blog is not that major, but I caved an decided to upgrade the GPU in my Tower, also known as the Frankenstein computer, or the Workhorse computer. This worries me slightly as while I hear from my friend that the GPU works fine with the PSU in the system, and all power calculations say it is acceptable, it is a little below the recommended wattage on the GPU specs.

But this should roughly double the computation speed of the GPU tasks, which rather excites me. I am going from a 1.5GB GT 440 OEM, to a 2GB GT 640 both of which are Nvidia cards. This goes from 144 Cuda cores to 384 Cuda cores. Sadly I am still trying to unravel GPUs so I am not sure if the Cuda cores run on the Graphics clock or the Processor clock, but either way the 640 should be a good improvement.

Thinking I was being both power saving, and nicer to the noise levels in my place at night ( this PC is located rather close to my bed), decided to go with a passive cooling card. I hope I will not regret this decision, but I do know for the first few hours of crunching once I receive the card, and get it installed, I will be watching the temps on the GPU like a hawk, and if it gets anywhere close to too high, I will pull the plug, and try and get new fans for my computer.

I hope it does not come to that, but I honestly never tried to look at how well the air flows inside that computer.